What Makes a Good SEO Agency

by Tom BucklandUpdated On May 16, 2019

What makes a good SEO agency?

Is there anything else other than results that makes up a good SEO agency. In my experience there is.

1.) Communication

But not too much.

One of the most frustrating things for SEO agencies is having clients that call up every single week asking why they are not ranked yet.

This is not actually the clients fault to be fair.

It’s the fault of the SEO agency in that they have not mentioned that results take a few months to kick in (unless you are target extremely uncompetitive keywords.)

So when you hire an SEO agency there should be a lot of expectation management, including pre-set times for calls and questions so there is not a lot of back and fourth via email which of course drains the energy and resources of both the client and the provider of SEO.

2.) Saying No

This one is an interesting one.

Saying no to clients is a very important skill to learn.

Avoid the specification encroucment that clients like to try.

For example if you are doing SEO and a client wants to go into PPC or FB ads for example and asks if you can do this. Say no.

Why?

Well 2 reasons.

1.) It dilutes your efficiency.

2.) It is not specific to your business or offerering.

It’s likely if you are good at SEO you will know how to do FB ads or PPC quite well.

But this is a real issue.

You do not want to dilute your efficiency.

3.) Building Campaigns for ROI

ROI is the single greatest way to measure business success.

Not Social followers, retweets, links, increases in organic rankings but ROI.

If we improve rankings by 10% but this results in ?10Million in increased sales and this only cost ?10,000…. Then that’s a great ROI.

If we increase revenue by ?2,000 and charge ?500. That’s not so good.

Build campaigns and pricing around ROI.

This is how we have built our proposals for the past 18 months and have seen some very good results for both our agency and our clients.

Because we don’t under-price our services, when we do get a client who comes onboard we actually have the funds to rank them for some incredibly competitive keywords.

Not just this but we actually build pricing based on the competition (and hence potential ROI.)

For example if a client can make ?100,000 a month by ranking #1 for a group of keywords, we want to charge in the range of 2-5% of this. For more information on this process visit HQ SEO.

This means even if they don’t quite rank 1st they are still making an insanely profitable ROI on their investment.